


Squirrel Trouble

by PacificRimbaud



Series: Love and Accidents [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Auror Neville Longbottom, Comedy, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Falling In Love, Fire, Romance, Sexual Tension, Squirrels, Swearing, bloody nose, pandemonium
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:01:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27480886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: Neville Longbottom was fairly certain that his duties as an Auror did not include removing squirrels from attics.Or demons.Or demon squirrels.Or whatever was running around overhead in Pansy Parkinson's house.For some reason, he found it hard to say no.In any case, it would only take him a moment to fetch it down.ALove and Other Historical Accidentsstory, based onSquirrel Cop, an episode ofThis American Life.
Relationships: Neville Longbottom/Pansy Parkinson
Series: Love and Accidents [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2008108
Comments: 56
Kudos: 213
Collections: dissendium to dreams





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreamsofdramione](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsofdramione/gifts).



> Happy birthday, K! I hope you have a wonderful day, that you feel all the love that your friends in fandom are sending your way, and that you enjoy this absurd [Love and Other Historical Accidents](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21496525/chapters/51233119) side quest. It is for you, my friend!
> 
> This story is loosely based on [Squirrel Cop](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/115/first-day/act-two-0), an episode of [This American Life](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/).
> 
> **Subsequent chapters will include M rated content.**

_Name: Neville Longbottom_

_Age: 23_

_Location: London_

_Relationship status: Single_

_Occupation: Auror_

_Income:_

Neville lay his quill down on his blotter, propped his elbows on the edge of his desk, and rubbed his fingertips against his forehead.

“You’ve actually met women this way?” he asked.

“Loads.” On the opposite side of the room, boots crossed on the surface of his desk, tilted back at a forty-five degree angle in his chair and champing away at a piece of spearmint gum, Cormac tossed a quaffle into the air and then caught it again. “A lot of the girls below our year turned out to be _really_ fit. And they just keep on graduating, don’t they?”

Neville stared at the form in front of him.

 _Charmed to Meet You_ advertised itself as the most popular dating service for witches and wizards in Britain on a half page in full color in _The Daily Prophet_ each Sunday. That it had achieved this honor by being the only dating service for witches and wizards in Britain didn't make it into the copy.

In large letters printed in shimmering gold ink beside an illustration of a man’s hand sliding a diamond ring onto a woman’s finger, the agency boasted a success rate of eighty percent. If one took the trouble to read the fine print at the bottom of the advertisement, it was clarified that a person might expect to be asked for a third date slightly under eighty percent of the time following a second date responders identified as “successful.” There was no published information on how often second dates occured, or what defined _success._

“You’ve got to keep your plates spinning, though,” said Cormac. He flicked his wrist in a way Neville had never managed to understand, and the ball spiraled as it rose. “Always go out with more than one at a time. And never let any one girl think you like her best. If they know you have other options, they come crawling after you. Trust me on that.”

Neville's experience with women was admittedly somewhat limited. His experience with Cormac was extensive enough that he knew not to trust him on the subject of spinning plates or crawling women or absolutely anything at all.

He’d tried trusting him once, during a stakeout at a dilapidated farmhouse in the Oxfordshire countryside, sitting side by side in a pair of folding chairs and waiting for the midnight appearance of the Kidlington Kipper. It was a ghost, they'd been informed, it had killed several people, and it was called the Kidlington Kipper because its materialization at the bottom of a dry-rotted staircase was always accompanied by a distinctive piscine odor. Neville might have smelled it before it was already breathing offensively beside their ears, if Cormac hadn’t brought along a packet of four fish paste sandwiches and decided that 11:56 was a brilliant time to dig in.

He’d given trusting Cormac another go only recently, allowing him to chatter for a solid week on patrols and with his feet propped on his desk about his sincere and unwavering belief that Moira McEathron in Sports and Games was clearly, indisputably, unambiguously showing sexual—no, _romantic_ —interest in Neville. It took only the slightest application of interpersonal skill to learn from her own mouth that Moira McEathron in Sports and Games was clearly, indisputably, unambiguously sexually and romantically interested in women—was _only_ interested in women, was in fact _getting married to a woman_ within a month _—_ which was how Neville learned that an invitation to drinks together might be swiftly and imperceptibly clarified to mean, actually, drinks together _with everyone,_ at lads’ night, to hear what she had to say about Quidditch.

Which was how lads’ night had grown to include all sorts of lads: sporty lads, arty lads, broad lads, small lads, and lads who were Moira McEathron and her wife Becky, a Beater for the Holyhead Harpies.

“When you say that you’re meeting witches,” Neville said, skepticism pinching his eyelids taut, “I wonder what you _mean._ ”

“Meet. Have drinks. Be invited back to their flat to meet their cat.” Cormac flinched as he caught the ball a centimetre away from his chiseled chin. “You just—” Cormac smirked to himself “—gotta keep the plates spinning, Longbottom. You know.”

No.

Neville did not know.

And he did not particularly care to.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to meet women.

It wasn’t that he didn't want to pet their cats.

He was quite fond of them. Cats. And women. And women's cats.

And it wasn't that he didn't want to be invited back to their flats. That had been going on since the summer he found himself swarmed with young women who wanted to know everything about what had happened with the snake. He’d been willing to tell them, and in some fashion had appreciated the opportunity to talk. But over and over again, it turned out that when a woman asked him to her home, and into to her room, she never had earnest conversations about his heroism at the Battle of Hogwarts in mind.

His astonishment, for some reason, only spurred them on.

He wasn’t surprised that he liked sex—that was to be expected—only that women seemed to want to have it with him. And when he was told not once, but many times that he had a natural talent for it, he was staggered. Still, there was something about getting off with a girl he couldn’t picture waking up beside in two or five or ten years that left him feeling a bit sorry that it had happened.

“You’re a romantic,” Hermione had told him once, wrapping her cool hand around his. “Honestly, it’s lovely.”

She’d been wearing an extremely tight sweater dress in thin grey wool that made his skin itch sympathetically, and had a festive curl of tinsel trapped in her hair.

“I don’t think of myself as being romantic,” he’d said. “I’m not very good at flowers, and gestures, and all that.”

But he had to own, watching Harry and Ginny on the dance floor at the Ministry Christmas party, that as his mates from school paired off, started referring to one another as “my partner,” moved in together, and got engaged, he felt as though he were standing at the dock and watching the boat pull away. Even Draco Malfoy, wearing one of his unconscionably expensive three piece suits and an exceedingly _un_ festive expression as he glanced at Neville and Hermione at the open bar, had a date, shuttling one of the clerks from payroll around the room with a hand at her lower back.

“I mean that you’re old-fashioned. _Traditional,_ ” Hermione had said. “In a good way. You want to court someone. Fall in love. You’ll meet her.” She’d sipped at a glass of champagne. “Or maybe you already have.”

It was easy enough for her to say.

She was perfectly in love with Ron.

In the Auror’s office, Neville kicked his heels against the bottom of his chair, and picked up his quill.

He skipped over the question about his income, and moved on to:

_Do you smoke? If so, how often?: No_

_Do you drink? If so, how often?: Yes. Lightly._

_Would you like to start a family? If so, when?:_

His quill paused.

At the end of each shift he went home, usually alone, to a maisonette with an enormous garden space in Sutton. There was room enough for a man who needed a place to hang up his wand holster, wash off the grime of the day, and lay down his head for the night. He'd prioritized a garden when he’d first gone looking, and had no regrets. He spent his days off puttering in the little greenhouse and in the growing number of garden beds, messing about with the proliferating ceramic pots lining the flagstone walk.

Like Ron and Harry, he’d put in enough years to achieve Step 4 of the Auror’s salary schedule: a respectable, but modest, government compensation, with a robust benefits package and a solid pension waiting at the end.

He was doing well, for his age.

Was he prepared for a family?

That wasn’t the question.

He twirled his quill between his knuckles like he’d seen Ron do, dropped it halfway across, and picked it up again before he scratched away at his form.

_Yes. As soon as I meet the right woman._

“One of you is needed.” Vera—middle-aged, hair half grey and half washed-out blonde, sapped of all patience with the chicanery she met with each time she poked her head around the corner from the dispatch room—waved a piece of parchment in the air. “We’ve had a message about something in—” she looked at the writing on the page “—an attic in Kensington.”

“Potter’s on field duty today. So’s Weasley.” Cormac snapped his gum and flinched as he nearly missed the quaffle again. “Why don’t you get either of them on the commspell?”

“I did. Harry’s popped by to help with the arrests at the nudist necromancers, and says he’s only just ordered a sandwich,” said Vera. “And Robards sent Ron up to Manchester this afternoon. Something about a homicidal skeleton. I haven't been able to reach him.” 

“Then that’s you, Longbottom.” Cormac didn’t take his eyes off the ball.

“I’m on my dinner break just now. I was intending to pop over and see about a curry, and I’ve got reams of reports here,” said Neville. “You’re—”

Faffing about, he thought.

Cormac didn’t respond, and went on with his faffing.

Neville dropped his quill back in the inkwell and swiveled his chair toward Vera.

“Something? In an attic? That's all we have to go on?”

Vera shrugged.

“Alright.” Neville rolled his sleeves down and pulled his suit jacket off the back of his chair. “What’s the address?”

A late winter wind sank its teeth into his sides as he Apparated into a residential square, standing at the corner of a tree-lined, broad and preternaturally unlittered pavement. His appreciation renewed for the handsome long black wool overcoat his grandmother had given him when he’d first been accepted into training with the DMLE. He drew it tightly around his ribs, and set to work matching the address written on a slip of parchment in his hand to the stately houses facing the postage stamp park in the middle of the square. One of them still belonged to a distant branch of Longbottoms, along with an extremely old and weatherbeaten Tudor manor house called Bugg-Buntley Hall on a sprawling estate in Wiltshire. He’d been to Bugg-Buntley once, as a very small child, to be presented to a quavering great uncle once or twice or thrice removed. All he could remember was the Muggle television set in the drawing room that his uncle had kindly set to a frenetic puppet show _,_ and his uncle’s seedy leather slippers flapping against the long carpet fibers, green as pea soup.

He found the address at last: a patrician house in the middle of its row, built from the same clean white Portland stone as all the others, with an enormous black front door and window boxes crowded with early daffodils.

He clanged the heavy brass knocker three times, and waited. A minute later, a man answered.

“Hello.” He sounded posh and ambiguously Continental.

He was shorter than Neville by a wide margin. Narrower, too, with thick, disheveled brown hair. He looked to be around thirty, and wore a white cotton undershirt and dress trousers that sat maladjusted on his hips, like he’d hastily pulled them on.

He had a dark red semicircular stain printed at the corner of his mouth.

“Who is it?”

A woman’s voice echoed down the expansive hallway behind the open front door. Neville recognized something in her timbre and her tone. He struggled for a moment to place it, then gave it up.

“It’s the Auror,” the man called down the passageway. “About your demon.”

The man stepped aside and waved Neville into the house.

“May I take your coat?” the man asked. He sounded uncomfortable. “I'm afraid we’ve dismissed the elves for the evening.”

When Neville declined, he seemed to feel that his duty had been dispatched and lost interest, wandering down the hallway without any indication as to whether or not Neville ought to follow.

Nevillle, overcoat still hanging from his shoulders, trailed after him.

At the end of the hall and to the right, a door opened into a large sitting room.

The exterior of the house and the size of its rooms signalled wealth. Inside, by the subtle craft and substantiality of the fittings, and the impeccable harmony and elegance of all of the objects inside, one was informed of taste.

There was something about very expensive things, Neville thought, that was often so nakedly _better_ that it made a person feel a bit ashamed of their own standard issue sofa or affordable woven rug.

The sofas here had gravitas. They were upholstered in fabrics that looked indulgent and difficult to clean, flanked by wingback leather chairs that had the aura of old books and wizened cigars and geriatric brandy about them. Even the tables looked like they must have been dear, polished to a dull luster and supporting faultlessly minimal displays of polite and pretty objects that Neville wasn’t sure had any use.

The house screamed: _old money._

The room declared: _good taste._

The subtle vibrations of its timbers and stones whispered: _pureblood._

Someone had lit a fire against the damp chill of the February evening, and the blaze in the sizable hearth snapped and hissed agreeably. Despite its formality, the room felt pleasingly warm, which was good, because Pansy Parkinson stood in the middle of it wearing no more than her knickers and a flimsy robe.

It wasn’t a robe, it was a—

Neville searched for the right word.

It was a dressing gown, he supposed, only that might not have been right, as you couldn’t accurately describe her as being dressed while she wore it. It was made of burgundy silk, with borders of intricate black lace at the ends of a pair of wide sleeves, and more at the hem, which came up to—or stopped at?—the very tops of Pansy’s narrow thighs.

She wore her dark hair in a bob with a fringe as she’d always done, only just now it looked mussed, like she’d recently woken up.

Her lipstick was a dark red smear, faded and worn.

Neville glanced at the man who’d let him in, now standing at the bar filling a glass with a single ice cube and several fingers of brown liquor from a crystal decanter.

“Drink?” he asked, holding out the glass. The daub of red over his mouth and the splotches at his neck matched the blur on Pansy’s lips.

Neville shook his head in the negative. “No, thank you. I mean, _thank you._ I would, but I’m on duty.”

Neville looked back at Pansy.

She was beautiful. There was nothing for it.

At school, she’d been twiggy and a bit knobbly-kneed, like a baby giraffe, with hard-looking, scrutinizing eyes and a tendency to stand with her arms folded crossly over her chest.

Her conduct ought to have rendered her ugly to him: the careless cruelty of her words, the unkind way she laughed, her petty displays of dubious superiority, and at last, her cowardice and self-interest.

But it hadn't—not at the beginning, nor once the war was over and they'd returned to school, where she withdrew into a long and solitary silence.

That had been nearly five years ago, and he hadn’t seen her since.

She was still very thin, but adulthood had filled her out and smoothed her over, and he had to work hard to not notice the subtle curve of her diminutive breasts to either side of the opening of her gown.

“Heya, Pansy.” He shoved his hands in his trouser pockets to still a puzzling need to fidget.

She’d been taking him in since he entered the room, and by the way her eyelids and the corners of her mouth contracted, it appeared that some sort of skirmish was going on inside her.

He’d nearly reached his final adult height during his eighth year at Hogwarts, but since leaving school for good, he’d gained three centimetres, and shed every remnant of the plushness of his youth. He’d grown broader. Lines and angles had appeared in all sorts of places where they'd never been before. He had no idea whether his face appealed as well, but he kept it shaved and clean, and it was where Pansy lingered most.

“Longbottom,” she said at last.

“Do you two know each other?” The boyfriend, sounding peevish, rattled the ice cube around in his drink.

Pansy’s eyes rolled back in her head.

Neville thought, with dismay, that she was disgusted with him, but then she tilted a hip to one side and propped her hand on the opposite, and waved her blood-red manicure toward her half-dressed male guest.

“Longbottom, this is Henry Herbert-Hastings, Marquess of It’s the Twenty First Century and Nobody Fucking Cares. Henry, this is Neville Longbottom.” She absently stroked a hand over the trailing tie of her robe while she continued to look at Neville.

To his embarrassment, a responding surge of interest asserted itself below his belt.

"I'm her fiancée," Henry added.

"You are _not_ my fiancée," Pansy hissed at him. "You’ve only asked me half an hour ago. I haven't answered you yet."

Neville hadn't noticed them before, but a pair of half-full champagne glasses and a red leather ring box sat on the corner of the coffee table.

"How do you know one another?" Henry asked, pointing between the two of them.

“We were at school,” Neville offered. “A long time ago.”

“I almost didn’t recognize you.” Pansy spooled the tie of her robe around her finger.

Neville was used to hearing it, but for some reason he drew himself up taller when it came from her.

“I recognized you straight away.”

“Did you?” Her shoulders dropped. “I think I’ve changed a very great deal, actually.”

“Does anyone want to talk about the demon?” Henry asked.

Neville and Pansy both looked at him.

"It's not a demon," said Pansy. "It's a fucking squirrel."

Pansy and Henry turned expectantly to Neville.

Neville's duties as an Auror with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement did not include capturing squirrels.

He opened his mouth to tell them as much. He even reached a hand into his inside coat pocket to retrieve a card with the contact information for Beast Control in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.

But there was a tiny gold P on a delicate chain dangling low on Pansy’s sternum, and when she turned by a degree to look at Henry, it caught the light and drew Neville's attention.

It was a lovely little thing, Pansy's P.

To its left, and to its right, beneath the lustrous silk of Pansy's un-dressing gown, were a pair of lovely little nipples.

"A squirrel," Neville said to Pansy's profoundly present breasts.

He knew, in his bones, that if he were to cross the room in four long strides and slip that soft-looking gown off her shoulders, each one of her small, exquisite breasts would fit perfectly under his palms.

One of the floorboards creaked as Pansy's marital hopeful shifted from one leg to another.

Neville tore his eyes away from Pansy's rib cage and looked at her face again.

He expected her to be angry with him for staring at her nipples, but she was no such thing.

She'd gone wide-eyed and splotchy. Pink rose at her cheeks and throat and flowed down between her breasts, but she looked paler everywhere else.

He drew himself up to his very tallest height.

If Pansy had a squirrel, he was going to capture it.

"Where is it?" he asked her.

She looked confused. "What?"

"The demon, Pansy." Henry sucked at the dregs of his drink, then muttered, "You've got to be kidding me."

"It's not a fucking demon," said Pansy.

Just then a noise filtered down from overhead.

It sounded distant, as though it were muffled by the planks and plaster of several floors, but distinct. There was a frantic scratching and scrambling at hard wood that went on for a long time, and then a padded gallop, _parrump-parrumping_ from one corner to the next, a crash of metal, and then a thin and strident squeal.

Pansy seemed to recover herself.

"See?" She pointed overhead. "If that's a demon, it's the stupidest one I've ever heard."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick note: this is looking more like 4 chapters, at around 3k each. Sorry!!
> 
> Content warning: bloody nose

Henry Herbert-Hastings, Marquess of Nothing, had given up on his immediate sexual aspirations and put his shirt back on.

“Longbottom, did you say?”

He picked up his tumbler and gave its side an imperious tap.

“That’s right,” Neville answered.

He only half-attended. His focus had drifted of its own accord down Pansy’s legs and, for the moment, settled on her shoes.

They were high heels, and the sort that weren’t meant to be worn outside: teetering and insubstantial, with feather poufs attached to the straps over her feet.

“Did Henry offer to take your coat?” she asked.

She had lovely little toes.

“I did, Pans,” said Henry, defensively. “He declined.”

“You really ought to let me take it,” she said. “You don’t know what state the squirrel is likely to be in.”

Neville obliged her, shrugging off his overcoat and handing it to Pansy, who pulled her wand from a hidden pocket in her dressing gown and sent the coat drifting down the hall.

“Are you related to the Wiltshire Longbottoms?” Henry asked. “There’s a fine family seat over there. Bugg-Burley? Mid-16th century Tudor. It’s rather run to seed, if I recall, but excellent bones. Very close to Thornwood Abbey and the Avery place.”

“Bugg-Buntley Hall.” Pansy drew a hand through her hair, neatening it with a wandless spell. Then she swiped her thumb across her lips, and a clean-edged berry sheen replaced her faded lipstick. “Henry’s an architect.”

“I’ve only been to Bugg-Buntley once, and it was years ago.” Neville removed his suit coat, tossed it over the back of the sofa, and began unbuttoning his cuffs. “My great-uncle Carmichael lives there.”

“Would you like to come upstairs?” Pansy asked.

“Upstairs?” Neville paused, his left sleeve folded halfway back. “Yes. Because that’s where the squirrel is.”

“I’m going to Floo Andrews back about Dubai,” said Henry. “You two carry on, I’ll be up in a moment.”

Pansy clipped up the stairs and Neville followed, his hand trailing along the black banister, watching her soft-looking heels smack at the footbeds of her tippy little feather shoes.

On the first floor landing, they rounded the bend to a second flight.

As they progressed, he indulged in the view of Pansy’s legs. They were proportionally long, her skin polished from her pedicured feet to her thighs where they ducked below her hem.

He developed a keen new interest in silk satin and its ability to delineate the slopes of a pert bum.

Henry could be heard downstairs speaking at volume into the Floo.

“No. No, that’s not what I said, Andrews. If I wanted an aggressive fucking glass and steel phallus I’d go into Muggle architecture.”

Without warning, Pansy stopped just before the second storey landing and turned to face him.

“Oh—” He took hold of her hip to stop them colliding and toppling backward. “I’m so sorry.”

On even ground he stood a full head and a half taller than her. Three steps below, he could have tilted forward and touched his forehead to hers if she wanted him to.

She was pouting.

Her pink lips, her shining eyes, and her neat dark brows had all turned out for a good sulk.

“I have changed, you know,” she said.

“What?”

“I’ve _changed,_ Longbottom. I’m not the same person I was.”

She cocked her hip, and it shifted sideways under Neville’s palm.

Surprised he was still holding it, he let go, and lay his hand on the banister.

An extraordinary thump, followed by a forlorn and diminishing squeal, sounded from the attic.

“What have you been up to these last few years?” he asked.

“I’ve been away. In New York, mostly. Hong Kong. Paris. Los Angeles. Just—” she waved her hand “—places.”

“Congratulations.”

“On what? Avoiding London for five years?”

“Your engagement,” he said.

“I’m not engaged.”

“But didn’t—”

Pansy's jaw tensed. “I didn’t ask him to ask me.”

“Are you going to say yes?”

“I might." She twisted the thin gold chain of her necklace around her finger. "I certainly could, if I wanted to.”

She’d dropped into a pettish murmur.

“What I’m trying to say is that I’m not fifteen anymore.”

“No,” Neville agreed, “I can see that.”

“And I’m…” Her fingertip darkened momentarily above the tourniquet she’d made of her necklace. “I’m sorry. That I wasn’t very nice to you.”

She was understating the case. But Neville, not in the habit of maintaining a pointless grudge, had preemptively forgiven her, somewhere around the moment she’d insisted on taking his coat.

“Thank you for apologizing,” he said.

“It’s not just because you’re tall, either.”

“No?” He corrected his posture, widening the margin of his height advantage.

“No. I’ve apologized to a lot of people. Almost all of them were shorter than you.”

A rhythmic banging began upstairs. Each impact was trailed by a frictional resonance, like heavy furniture being pushed across a bare floor.

Neville meditated on the dual potential states of Pansy below her dressing gown. She might be wearing knickers, or nothing at all. She might simultaneously be dressed in lingerie and entirely nude, until someone tugged on the gown’s tie and found out.

Henry continued conversing at the Floo downstairs.

“I’m glad that my height didn’t factor into it,” said Neville.

Pansy seemed fixated on his forearm, angled along the banister. 

“It doesn’t factor into _anything.”_

She pivoted sharply, and resumed clacking upward on her ridiculous shoes.

Neville followed.

He tried to rally his professional faculties, and spent the climb recalling the five most common restraint spells and considering which was most appropriate to caging a squirrel.

Pansy stopped short again. Once more, Neville had her by the hip.

“I probably will,” she said as she turned around, Neville’s palm sliding across her lower back.

She had bicolored hazel irises: desaturated green around a rust-colored inner border.

“You probably will what?” he asked.

“Marry him.”

“The architect?”

“I don’t see why not.”

At the end of adolescence, the global anxiety that paralyzed Neville in his youth had melted away, uncovering a steady and reliable intelligence.

He was a methodical problem-solver and an observer, rather than a scathing intellect. But he’d regularly seen generous flows of stupidity issue from brilliant minds. Given a choice between quickness or the ability to pay attention, he’d take the latter every time.

Pansy stood before him on the stair, chin hoisted.

For some reason, she seemed to want Neville to argue with her.

In that moment—her would-be fiancée blustering downstairs and a demon rearranging furniture overhead—Neville saw Pansy Parkinson quite plainly.

If there was a ridge rising along a cold salt sea, Pansy was the castle built on its peak.

She’d founded her fortress at a forbidding elevation, then built up her towers and battlements until they were unscalable, every embrasure prickling with archers’ arrows.

But beyond the outer walls, past the inner courtyards, at the unseen top of the solitary keep, lay something unknown.

Whatever it was, Neville suddenly felt it was very much worth having.

He supposed most men, thwarted, ego-bruised and terminally curious, would saddle up, gallop across the drawbridge and have a go at the portcullis.

The smarter ones might show up after sundown with a ladder or a grappling hook.

An absolute fool arrived wheeling a trebuchet.

Henry Herbert-Hastings, it was now obvious, was riding around in circles on the plains below, unfurling a victory banner when he hadn’t even crossed the moat.

Neville wanted her. There was no purpose to denying it. It was retrospectively apparent, too, that he’d noticed, appreciated, and—with a masochism he didn’t care to scrutinize—desired her since he was a boy.

But clearly, he thought, one could enter her and still not be inside.

And what was the point of that?

“Hello.” Henry had finished with his Floo call, and stared at them from the intermediate landing. “Is there a problem up there?”

“Pansy’s deliberating,” Neville said.

She scowled. “I’m not deliberating.”

Neville’s hand remained on her hip. He had the notion—though no idea that he’d ever get the chance to test it—that if he politely told the marquess to fuck off, gathered Pansy up and bundled her through the nearest bedroom door, he’d confirm every one of his suspicions about her fortifications before twenty minutes were up.

Under the pretense of checking his battered watch, he released her hip before Herbert-Hastings noticed and brought out an architect’s scale as a dueling weapon.

“I don’t think this will take more than a few minutes,” said Neville. “And then you can get back to not deliberating.”

“That watch is an atrocity,” said Pansy, touching its scuffed face. “What have you been doing to it?”

“I wear it at work. And while I’m gardening.” Neville tapped at it, a surprisingly practical gift from a hostile uncle. “I suppose it gets wet more often than it would prefer, but it’s fine. Mostly.”

He’d failed to give her whatever argument she wanted to have about her silly, struggling gentleman caller, and she was still pouting. Neville wondered what would happen if he told her how adorable she looked.

She puffed out a breath, then continued up the stairs.

An unremarkable door on the third storey landing opened onto a poky stairwell. Pansy took out her wand and lit the single lantern hanging from the ceiling, revealing steep stairs and another door at the top. Beyond that, either a demon or a squirrel kept up its disconcerting and irregular ruckus.

Trained to keep his wand holstered as long as possible, Neville ducked through the lower door and scaled the stairs.

Pansy watched him from below, wide-eyed, garotting her finger with her necklace again. Henry monitored the situation, his hand crooked over his chin with an air of quasi professional interest.

Neville considered the appropriate tactical sequence for opening attic doors on rodents and demonic entities.

Step one: open door.

Step two: capture.

The door was locked.

Neville drew his wand and muttered, _“Alohomora.”_

At the sound of the lock clicking open, all noise beyond the door stopped.

Slowly, Neville drew in a breath and turned the handle.

Past the door was the shadowed and silent interior of an ordinary unfinished storage space.

A flick of his wrist ignited a half dozen sconces. They were small and dim, retreating along the walls and half-illuminating a sea of substantial clutter: cloth-covered furniture, dusty trunks, and bric-a-brac shrouded in cobwebs that twisted in the draft from the open door.

It smelled stale and desiccated, aging leather mingling with mineral powder and the urinary tinge of dried baby’s breath.

In the center of the room, a rocking chair tilted to and fro on its runners, as though an unseen sitter had just vacated it.

“ _Lumos directa._ ”

From Neville’s position in the door frame, the concentrated beam of light penetrated between curiously rotated armoires, dressing tables, stacked steamer trunks and childhood relics.

Dust coated the floor, cut by arcs where the furniture had shifted, and marked with—Neville crouched and squinted to confirm—animal tracks.

Paw-prints clustered in sets around the room, four long toe-marks radiating from each tiny round-edged palm. The grouped prints skipped and rotated in frenetic, random patterns. Whatever creature made them had hopped from one place to another with no apparent agenda.

The space was quiet, save the rocker rails sighing in the dust and Pansy and Henry talking softly below.

Having determined to push forward, Neville stood. As he did, the bottom of a sheet covering a hulking wardrobe fluttered. He aimed his wand light at it, and was rewarded with a rocky growl, then a scraping scutter, and the sheet twitched sideways before resettling.

Another scrabble on the floorboards, and the same growl emanated from beneath a low rectangular table. Its cover wafted upward, and then went still. 

Neville squared his shoulders, and pointed his light at the table legs.

The grumbling resumed and intensified, and then the drop cloth shifted violently as whatever lurked below burst backward, away from Neville and his light.

A clatter rose in an unseen corner, like someone in a foul mood putting away the clean dishes, followed up with a metallic _bong_ and a tyrannical, angry squeal.

Both the attic sconces and the pendant lamp overhanging the stairs blinked off.

“Everything alright up there?” Henry called from the bright rectangle of the open door below.

Aurors were known for their bravery, their ability to continue working with simple fractures, and for their reflexes.

The second the fine vellus hair on Neville’s forearms began to lift, he dropped into a crouch.

An object flew from the depths of the dark, mediumish and roundish and smooth-sided. It cleared the length of the attic, hurtled over Neville’s head, and glinted in the downstairs light, whistling faintly as it dropped down the stairwell.

Neville rotated on his heel and opened his mouth to shout a warning, but he was preempted by the unmistakable pop of disrupted cartilage and a glottal masculine scream.

“Holy living _fuck!”_

The growling in the attic resumed, accompanied by intensified dish clattering. Neville shot to his feet, yanked the door closed and held it shut.

Henry lay curled at the bottom of the stairwell, a hammered silver vase rocking on its side near his head. His hand cupped his nose, which was fountaining bright red blood down his chin and onto the floor.

“The _fuck,_ Longbottom!” he shouted. “What the fuck did you do that for?”

Pansy had dropped to his side, her knees demurely folded together, and pulled out her wand.

“That wasn’t me,” said Neville. “It was the squirrel.”

“Squirrels don’t fucking throw things,” Henry roared, his voice squinched high into his sinuses.

“Yes, they do.” Pansy pulled at Henry’s hands, trying to get a clear look at his nose.

_“How?”_

“They have _fingers,_ Henry.” She splayed her fingers and twiddled them.

Neville closed his eyes, assessing where they stood.

Squirrel? Certainly.

Demon? One was forced to seriously consider it.

He cast a quiet _Protego,_ and on a count of three, he opened the door, dodging left as a silver cow-shaped cream pitcher spiraled past.

Another gasping shout burst from the crumpled man at the base of the stairs.

“Fucking _fuck!_ ”

Neville jumped through the door and shoved it closed behind himself.

He lit his wand’s tip in time to watch a ceramic shepherdess approach, bonnet-first, strike the shield, and burst into a shower of Delft Blue fragments. Next came a steak knife, tumbling end over end. It rebounded, and embedded itself at a forty-five degree angle in the floor.

The skittering and squealing stopped.

Aurors who wished to survive the job rapidly learned to keep their ears open. Neville ignored the marquess’s burbling stream of profanities and attended to the dark.

At first he heard nothing more threatening than a breeze brushing the shingles overhead.

And then: jittering claws on the floorboards; dry hinges whining; and finally breathing, so hoarse and diminished it was hardly discernible.

He crouched low, muttered _“Lumos directa,”_ and prodded the hard light into each nook and cranny in a methodical sweep around the perimeter.

Straight ahead, the drop cloth covering a tall armoire sagged to one side. While he paused to observe, the armoire’s left door swung minutely on its hinges.

He approached it, his wand at the ready, ears trained on the subtle breathing he now located behind the half-closed double doors.

Several years into his career, the usual spells came easy as blinking.

_Expelliarmus. Stupefy. Incarcerous._

Hopefully the squirrel didn’t have a wand.

He picked up the drop cloth’s trailing corner, yanked it down, then tossed it aside and took two steps back.

_“Aberto.”_

Both doors yawned open, revealing a row of hanging garments. Most were zipped into canvas bags, but a dust-muted tuxedo and several sequined evening gowns hung uncovered. The skirts pooled on the shelf below, throwing the armoire’s rear wall into deep shadow.

The breathing grew louder and quickened, sounding ragged and asthmatic.

Two gleaming circles, incandescent red as tempered iron, resolved in the uncanny depths between a knife-pleated skirt and a dangling pair of trouser legs.

_Stupefy. Incarcerous._

_Probably not Expelliarmus._

The red-hot coins blinked.

A predatory snarl issued from the back of the armoire.

Neville settled his weight evenly between his legs, prepared for swift movement in any direction.

A woman’s dress shoe erupted from behind the evening wear.

Neville had prepared himself for another bombardment. When the glossy green, floral-embossed ladies’ one-strap glanced off his shield charm, he hardly flinched. And when the shoe was followed by a springing mass of red fur the size of a West Highland White Terrier, he was ready for it.

Tufted ginger ears sprouted from its belligerent head, sweeping back in twin exclamations. Its long toes splayed out before it, claw-tipped and grasping. Its mouth hung open, revealing opposing pairs of sloping orange teeth, their tips gnashing together as its jaw chattered.

Neville’s face would have marked the end of its plotted trajectory. As he swayed out of its path, it rolled its body sideways, pedaling its claws toward him, its luminous red eyes boring into him with homicidal yearning.

A length of cream-colored fabric hung from its neck, fanning out behind it like a cape. It wasn’t until the squirrel’s shoulders struck the closed attic door and it righted itself on its feet with a yawp of rage that Neville could see it had pushed its head through the armhole of an antiquated silk satin brassiere.

It had enormous, stiff, structurally elaborate cups.

Neville had a clear shot.

_“Incarcerous.”_

But lap-dog sized or not, it was a fucking squirrel. It jumped vertically with such blinding alacrity it seemed to have Apparated, and hung by its paws from the doorknob, staring at Neville and piping its evil opinions at him in squirrel chatter.

Either accidentally unbalanced by its great brushy tail or because its malevolent intellect understood torsion, the squirrel rotated downward, still gripping the doorknob.

The door creaked open.

_“Stupe—”_

Before Neville finished the first syllable, the squirrel had blurred around the edge of the door, and bounded down the stairs.


End file.
